I'm reading this now. Unlike most travel books (which this is mostly) it doesn't seem dated after 15 or so years. It was a real bargain since I picked it up for 50 cents at a Goodwill.
Finally finished The Making of the Atomic Bomb. Fantastic book. Loved it. It is long but it really isn't dry. I am definitely not a scientist and I was able to understand most of the real science-y stuff. If anyone even has a remote interest in the subject I highly recommend picking it up and reading it. Now, onto:
Yellow Earth by John Sayles. Like most people, I know Sayles as a film director. This is my first venture into a novel written by him. It's a tale of shale oil found beneath the fictional US town of Yellow Earth and what ensues. I'm excited to read this.
Collective Illusions - Todd Rose Fairly short, a little over 200 pages in hardcover form, and really well laid out. Rose starts with three chapters on conformity traps. Things like why we let our false view of public opinion cause us to keep our personal opinion to ourselves and why we continue to buy bottled water despite how much energy it uses and waste it produces. The next three are part of our social dilemma. He touches on some of the neuroscience that shows different parts of our brain firing once we know the public averages on beliefs about things than fire when we're making our own judgements, and doing so even when the "public averages" are completely made up as well as the effects of algorithmically curated social media feeds reinforcing beliefs of things we know are false. This section interestingly notes that until 1997 the number one value in TV shows was community feelings of benevolence, and until 2007 (hello iPhone) the other top values were being kind and helping others. The final three chapters focus on how we can reclaim our power and overcome the various forces working at keeping us from identifying truth instead of just conforming to prevailing opinion. Here the topics include things like personal congruence, where our actions match up to our actual beliefs instead of societal norms, and trusting strangers instead of always assuming the worst of people. Fantastic book that I'll probably refer to quite a bit going forward.
He's not a great novelist, but he's not a waste of time, either. Basically, his novels are stories that would be too expensive to be turned into a movie.
All the Books of My Life, a memoir focused on the reading and writing lif3 of a largely forgotten British novelist of the middle 20th century, Sheila Kaye Smith, which was donated to a recent student book sale by a recently deceased nun. Interesting book.
Where The Deer And The Antelope Play by Nick Offerman. Offerman was apparently affiliated with the TV show Parks and Recreation, which I never watched. Musician Jeff Tweedy of Uncle Tupelo and Wilco fame is apparently along in this trip to Glacier National Park, which pleases this UT devotee. Should be interesting.
That's pretty much what he's most famous for. His character, Ron Swanson, a libertarian working in a small city government, is one of the greatest creations in the history of TV History and the New Left: Madison, Wisconsin, 1950-1970 a series of essays and interviews and oral histories of men and women, mostly history grad students, who recall what it was like to be a radical lefty in a midwestern University town from the McCarthy years through Viet Nam edited by one of them who was there, Paul Buhle. As (mostly) historians, they do a better than expected job avoiding nostalgia, but pretty much all of them engage in it to some extent. I'll let them slide.
Between the book about Mosse and this one, I think we all know what gig you're angling for. Also, as a young dumbshit studying in Madison I knew Paul Soglin, who I'm sure featured prominently in this book. I think that might be the first time I've name-dropped him in 25 years.
America's Prophet -- Bruce Feiler Light, breezy history that reads more like a travelogue, which is appropriate for a guy most known for Walking the Bible. Feiler spends a lot of time in first person detailing how he got to the various locations he's researching, and most of said research is presented via conversations with his curated lists of experts. It's not a style a like, but for the general populace, it's probably more accessible. Feiler's point is that time and again, Americans of all stripes, have referenced, euologized and sought Moses as a touchstone more than any other biblical character. The Moses iconography is of course apparent in the slavery narrative, but interestingly, Moses takes a central role in Lincoln's death. Lincoln died on Good Friday, which is a fact I must have forgotten, but in any event, of the hundreds and hundreds of extant sermons given to a grieving nation on Easter Sunday, the Moses story is used more than the Easter story. One interesting factoid: the fastest growing city in the world from 1820 to 1840 was.... Cincinatti. It was the sixth US city to hit the 25,000 population plateau.
I've read both of these. I'd recommend both too, for different reasons. Leonard Arrington (no C) was the first great historian of Mormonism - founder of the discipline really - and he's one of the only people both in the U Idaho Hall of Fame and with an Honorary Degree from UI. But he also peeled potatoes in his old residence hall back in the day, and I enjoy this photo of him from his student days:
Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe. This is a classic novel by an Asheville, NC author. Asheville is thinly veiled in the novel as Altamont. This pondering tome could be interesting.
The Fox Wife ~ Yangsze Choo A tale of a fox that can transform into a woman on the hunt for the man responsible for the death of her cub and a detective on her trail. Inventive use of the fox as human mythology.
So I teach a lot of 20th and 21st c. American poetry, often long (book length) poems, and I'm thinking, I don't know squat about 19th c. long poems... well, there's Whitman, whom I've actually read, and Longfellow, who I haven't really, until recently. So when I wonder are the 19th c. long poems by women. . . it turns out that An Idyl of Work, which follows four women through a year of their lives passing in and out of the Lowell spinning mills in the mid-19th century is just such a book. Lucy Larcom isn't really great, but she's not terrible, either. If she was, I wouldn't be about 20 minutes away from finishing this.
After recently teaching a class on US Diplomatic History, I am expanding my reading on that front. This includes William Burns' The Back Channel: A Memoir of American Diplomacy and the Case for Its Renewal: The enmity of the Trump Administration to diplomacy wasn't the start of the dismantling of American diplomatic capabilities, though it was the nadir. And since Burns retired prior to Trump taking office (and cut his teeth diplomatically during the Cold War), pretty much everything he writes about is from some sort of better days. It's a bit of an odd mix - part memoir, part advocacy. But he's not an impartial observer so when he finds we absolutely must rebuild it, it isn't particularly surprising. EDIT: He's currently director of the CIA, having directed the Carnegie Endowment for Peace post-State Department and pre-CIA.
The Life and Zen Haiku Poetry of Santoka Taneda, Japan's Most Beloved Modern Haiku Poet, and interesting biography of the poet Santoka, who spent most of his life as a wondering mendicant, writing and publishing haiku and drinking way too much saki (it's almost like reading about Kerouac in many ways) by Sumita Oyama, who appears in this biography as he knew, and cared for, Santoka in the poets last years, translated by William Scott Wilson
What makes completely average people become mass murderers? Not a whole hell of a lot when everyone else is doing it.
Faith And Treason by Antonia Fraser. It's a history of The Gunpowder Plot of early seventeenth century England, which was memorialized in the opening scenes of the film V For Vendetta. I might have to read more of Fraser after this. It looks very interesting.
FWIW--and not shaming you for reading it--that book has a problematic reputation among some Balkan specialists, academics, and activists. It's famously the book which convinced President-elect Bill Clinton to back off from his campaign promises to aid the Bosnian Muslims against genocide. So, for what it's worth, there are some people out there who will give you an earful about it.